Picking the brain of the Nuclear Mastermind



With not one but two albums, Animal and Not Animal coming out on October 7, a Daytrotter Session tomorrow, as well as an expansive North American tour, much is going on in the world of Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos. A few weeks back, UR spoke with Richard Edwards, the ringleader of the Indianapolis collective. – Drake Baer

What's in store for Lolla, how do you prep for the short set?
We don't really do anything different for it, I guess we play a few fewer songs, what we feel like doing on the day, I suppose. We don't tend to spend long times planning or executing.

What can you tell me about the upcoming releases, Animal and Not Animal. How has the band's sound changed or evolved since Dust of Retreat?
I'm not sure. I think it just sounds like the band. Besides the obvious stuff that changes, what touring for two or three years would do. When you do that, you're going to become a different type of band than you were before. I think the sounds are a little bit more ambitious in the arrangements; we're trying to catch up with that.

I don't know. It's pretty varied, some stuff is a lot louder, maybe noisier than the last record, there's a pretty big cross-section of different stuff.

Can you elaborate on how touring the last two or three years has changed the band and the music?
When you play one record for a long time, you find yourself changing things up, your own interest in it. We were never people who rehearsed everything, and trying to get it real tight and formal. We told ourselves to play live, and things would change from night to night. We would play off of one another, and you learn some stuff about the people playing around you. Maybe you encourage each other to break out of those structures, for example on our first record, I didn't know enough about anyone's musical taste and wasn't able to direct that towards them or away from it, and they probably didn't know enough of mine. When you play with people every night, you get tight and all the obvious stuff, but you also learn about each person, “OK, maybe I see them doing this a lot, and make everyone aware,” it's like being accountable. Tricks don't work any more on each other since you know so much about them.

That struck me as improvisational. Is improvisation part of the music, especially when performing live?
Yeah, I think it's the biggest thing. I think we play bad shows because of that, for the same reason we play really good shows. We don't have, and maybe we should have, as a band, (thorough) practice. We don't have the guitar stops perfectly on, we don't plan the shows really, we practice enough so that we get confident playing a song. We don't want to be lazy about it, we play off each other and dynamically make it. In studio, its taken away; live it's a little easier to do it.

What can you tell me about the Daytrotter Sessions to be released at the end of the month?
It's kind of being released at a strange time, it's going to come out right before the record. We've done a lot of radio things over the last couple years, maybe just Emily and I, maybe with a violin or something like that, maybe with a drumkit with brushes. All the songs take on {a sense} of how they'd be played if maybe you were outside on a porch at a get-together or something, having to approach them in that way. It's a very quiet, little, like playing in a small room. I think the songs came out pretty cool, and different, different from the album versions.

Releasing Animal and Not Animal at the same time: it seems kind of unorthodox to release two records at the same time. How did that come to be?
Well, it was basically them. We had one record, Animal. We recorded a whole bunch of songs. We sequenced and turned in ours, which was the record we wanted, and they didn't like it. So it went back and forth for maybe, almost three months, and it went back in forth between extremes of what was best for a song, it has to be changed this way. Eventually the idea was generated by one of us: why don't you guys just release all the shit that you like and leave ours alone.

Just release ours on vinyl and digital, which was something we wanted to do anyway, because as far as CDs, I guess people still buy them but they don't seem like something that really matters to me: if I want to hear something on the stereo I'll put on a record, {otherwise} I'll put it on my iPod, an mp3 on my computer. They didn't seem like they were into that.

We told them, “Look, you guys need to know what you want to do and leave ours alone. We'll take care of ours if you guys just put whatever songs we recorded that you liked on this other thing. I don't really consider it an album. I like the songs well enough, but I didn't record them for the album. It's not so much an album as a compilation.

I don't consider it an album, it's like you shoot all this stuff and somebody else cuts it for you: that's not your movie. You shot it, but. They picked the stuff they thought was cohesive, but it doesn't work for me as a front to back album.

Going back to what you do consider an album, what's the quality that holds Animal together?
It's just way better. It holds together as an album because we decided, we chose stuff in the order because it worked together, you know what I mean. We spent time on that side of it, not just recording songs but what song came next, and how much space was between them, when the album picks up and when it falls back. The songs on it are maybe more based, a lot for example is old new songs, two years ago written. Stuff on ours is generally around some sort of common theme, stuff that has interested us in the last year, with the exception of a couple songs.

I don't know, there's just a difference. I might think there's more of a difference than they're might be, because I'm involved in it. It's the difference of if somebody gives you 30 songs of each band you like, and says, 'make a mixtape,' and give the same 30 songs to your girlfriend, to your friend, and says 'make a mixtape;' they're going to be different. There might be stuff about her's that you like, but yours is the one that you care about. You picked the songs and ordered them in the way that you want to.

Let's step back a bit, can you tell me about your songwriting method, as a collective, how you decide whether or not you're going to include strings, etc?

That stuff is decided by all of us, Tyler and I do most of that, in terms of directing. I write the songs, it seems like it would be a really difficult thing, to try and write songs with eight people, or even one other person. I bring them in like that, and sometimes we rehearse them all together. I bring in a demo, and everybody, a little circle of people. The first thing, it needs a bed of noise and percussion under it, and that starts, one by one we fill it in, and then one dominant idea or two. Then it's kind of boring, really.

I did a little bit of reading, and it seems you really fancy The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson --
I did when I was younger.

That movie really struck me as well. How do other art forms impress upon your own art?
Like with the movie thing, I was a film student in college, that's one of my main interests or hobbies. I don't know exactly, I guess I write a lot of songs while watching certain movies.

What movies inspire you?
It changes a lot, I guess. I was really into crime/noir over the summer, Jules Dassin, things like that. I went through, everybody goes through a French new wave phase when they're young, I went through a western phase last summer while I was writing a lot. And then I watched The Last Temptation of Christ like 25,000 times.

Going back to Lollapalooza, what do you think of the opportunity to play before the thousands and thousands at the festival?
I don't know, I guess it might make me nervous if I think about it, so I'll try not to. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me, we'll just play in the afternoon. I'm just excited about seeing Radiohead, really.

Margot will play the MySpace stage at Lollapalooza on Saturday at 12:15 p.m.